Devonshire April May 17

improving your
PHOTOGRAPHY
with Nigel Jones
Challenging Light
There are times when the scene is fantastic, but your camera isnʼt able to cope with
the lighting conditions. Are you aware of your options in these situations?
As the person that carries out the
bulk of the photography for this
magazine, you can imagine Iʼve had
to develop effective strategies for
ensuring images taken on site are
usable when theyʼre downloaded
back in the office onto my mac.
Iʼm assuming that youʼre using a
camera with a viewfinder - digital
or optical (weʼll discuss this in a
later issue). If you donʼt, then it
becomes very difficult when youʼre
out and about taking shots, to
ensure youʼre capturing the right
quality exposures. Using just the
lcd display on the back of your
camera wonʼt be effective because
youʼll find viewing the exposure
and focussing extremely difficult
and ultimately hit and miss.
processed and unrealistic. A way
round this is to set your camera to
take 3 varying exposures in highburst
speed mode (ideally on a
tripod, using a remote trigger to
avoid camera shake), and then
you can blend and process them
on the computer using HDR software
such Hdrsoft, Photomatix,
Photoshop, etc.
supports RAW). RAW images are
the result of exactly what your
camera sees when you take the
shot, no in-camera processing is
applied. The beauty of this format is
they allow deep control over shadows
and highlights, the amount
of control you get over the image
is quite staggering. You may be
aware of this route, and have put
for the sky and clouds by using
compensation exposure. I tend to
generally use my camera in aperture
priority mode. This is where
you set the aperture manually, and
the camera works out the exposure
based on its light metering system.
Then I dial in exposure compensation
so that none of the white and
grey tones are lost in the clouds.
One of the problems with digital
cameras that cause the scenario
(1) on the right, is that whilst the
dynamic range of the human eye
and a higher end digital camera is
pretty similar (10-14 f-stops), our
eyes have a virtual range exceeding
24 f-stops. This is because our eyes
work in a manner more akin to a
video recorder, where our eyes
dynamically adjust as the subject
of our view changes, and also our
brain does a lot of processing to
combine all these different exposures
- the net effect being our
much greater perceived dynamic
range.
Getting back to the problem in
hand, high contrast lighting, there
are some effective strategies you
can adopt in order to arrive at the
final outcome of a decent photo.
1) HDR (High Dynamic Range)
your camera may have the ability
to generate HDR images, these
essentially are where the camera
takes 3 (or more) very rapid shots
at varying exposures and then
merges them inside your camera
using its processing capabilities.
This can (depending on the camera)
be quite effective, but photos
can sometimes appear overly
Scenario (1) - Chall enging light
You’ll often find this sort of thing happening,
particularly if there’s strong directional light in
front of the camera. You can come back earlier
or later in the day to take the shot when the sun’s
not directly in front, but here the directionality
of the light can cause problems, so strategies to
assist you should be adopted.
2) RAW processing
This is where your you set your
camera to save photos in both
.jpg and raw. Once home, you can
open up your images using a RAW
software plugin, and process these
images (providing your camera
off going any further with it. But
youʼd be missing the single most
useful tool if you wish to get more
from your photography.
What I tend to do in challenging
light situations when taking the
RAW route, is to ensure exposure
Corrected using RAW file
This image has been corrected using raw file
processing. If you have a decent grade of camera,
there will be various options open to you. You
could use in-camera HDR, or perhaps set the
camera to save files in RAW format in addition to
jpg. You’d set your camera so the sky is correctly
exposed, the land can then be recovered in RAW.
Of course, you can also create
variants, developing for the shadows,
midrange
and highlights
independently
from the same
processed raw
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